A Bakersfield punk writer meets Fortuna in Washington D.C. - By N.L. Belardes

*Image taken by Danetta Bramhall a few days before I arrived

I was feeling brave. I don’t always. I’m human. I get scared just like anybody else—even on Bakersfield’s streets of cowboy mystique. During league championship and playoff hockey games my stomach was the worst and went into knots. Giving speeches? More knots and heart attacks. Reciting poetry to 10,000? Fuggedaboudit. I was resurrected without the steel heart I hoped for.

Dark city streets? You have to be safe. You look over your shoulders. You try to gauge the intentions of people milling in the shadows. Then there’s the absolutely insane moments where you seek adventure and you have to just be as safe as you can because adventure simply means risk. Like when I wandered Baltimore at midnight. Like when I hopped an evening train from Baltimore’s Penn Station to Washington D.C.’s Union Station to meet up with Fortuna.

I was pissed. A kid with long black dreads pounded on a ticket booth—he was pissed too. A little old lady came out and shook her head. He was lost; I was lost. She didn’t care. They stopped selling tickets from Camden Yards—that’s Baltimore Orioles Stadium area—so I took a taxi from the nearby convention center to Penn Station at Mt. Vernon. I sat up front and got to know Clarence Mack, the nicest cabby you could ever meet. He’s a taxi driver of twenty-three years. His son’s a Baltimore cop, undercover.

As I sat down I heard some good Thelonious Monk bop from the radio. The announcer talked about John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis. I instantly felt far away from Bakersfield, far from the roots of Buck Owens and Korn. I didn’t hear a lick of Latino ska. This was a different America.

I pulled out my phone and asked Clarence if I could shoot some video. He grinned. I was making his day, swaying him from the boredom of stuffy suits and downtown ties. He knew I wanted to connect to his city… “My man,” Clarence said a few times, drawing out the words as if he blew them from a be-bop horn on a smoky stage. He loved that he was going to be on video and delighted in pointing out landmarks to me. I recommend that anyone going to Baltimore take a little ride with Clarence downtown for some great city flavor (410.790.6046).



We talked about undercover cops. Clarence nearly missed a car as he spoke, “They’re everywhere in Baltimore. They could be the guys sleeping on the streets. You never know,” he said. A few days later I hung out in Lexington Market. After I bought a Polish dog I walked from the market and saw a cop dressed like Shaft, full on black leather, tall, ominous, straight-lipped and a badge around his neck barely poking from his tough city streets coat. Not quite what you’d see in Bakersfield, California.



Clarence nearly crashed into a car as lanes merged. He didn’t seem bothered. A car honked. Maybe that was just the way driving was done in the Eastern U.S. He pointed to several more landmarks and then to Penn Station as we pulled up. “Go through the doors, my man… you’ll love DC. Great restaurants.”

It was close to 5:30pm. I tore into Penn Station and stopped at the information desk. “Last call for Baltimore Penn Station to Union Station, Washington D.C.” the announcer said. She sat at the information kiosk without a smile.

That’s me, I thought. “Which doors?” I asked.

“You better catch the train right now. You can purchase a ticket from the conductor,” she said and pointed in the general direction I needed to go.

My heart lunged. I rushed out the doors, jumped on the MARC train, and off it went. The conductor wore one of those cool hats you only see in the movies. He stopped and asked for my ticket. “You have to pay $3 more for buyin’ on the train, son.” I bought a round trip for $17.



The train sped through greenery, past little towns on the outskirts of Baltimore and Washington DC. Alongside an old cemetery it chugged, and eventually slowed as it entered Washington D.C. The Washington Monument was a shadow in the distance between buildings. Except for its pointed top, I would have thought it a stained smokestack distant in the cityscape.




At Union Station

I didn’t see much of Union Station as I met Fortuna near Gate D. I was lost. I called her. She said, “I’m wearing a big pink coat. Oh there you are,” and hung up. We hugged and she passed me a metroopensdoors.com SmarTrip card. “You wave it over the turnstile and they open. Now we can ride the Metro Rail.”

Fortuna is an amazing writer and instant connection in my little tour called life. She’s a member of Georgetown faculty and occasionally appears on TV and radio. She stood in front of me with her beautiful smile, big pink coat, and instantly swept me into a life I never knew existed except in the pages of books on history and current affairs. No, she’s no politician, but I certainly caught the feeling that Fortuna mingled with them upon occasion as she talks on 60 Minutes, NPR, and attends galas—not just for the free buffets—but to actually connect to people. Washington D.C. definitely appeared to me as a city of connecting points, people like dots with strings attached. We headed to the subway. I waved the card above the turnstile. It magically opened.

I followed her to a pair of seats. We talked and finally jumped off and took an escalator through a 1970s tunnel that looked more like we were being spit out by a giant cement worm into DuPont Circle, one of DC’s famed historic neighborhoods. I pictured an All the Presidents Men film shoot up the tunnel. Very retro. I felt on the verge of disco.



We walked in Dupont Circle for about a block or so and then jumped onto the G2 bus. Easy enough. I waved my card again—my ticket through the Capitol.

Just as we sat down a man screamed, “Fuck! I forgot my meds! Fuck!!” He buried his head in his hands then stood up and headed for the exit. One passenger politely told him he forgot something. He mumbled, grabbed whatever he’d left behind, then got off the bus.

“This is a regular occurrence,” Fortuna smiled. I wasn’t worried. I’ve rode Bakersfield’s Golden Empire Transit a lot… there are bus scenes in Thick White Crust, and in the forthcoming novel, Peninsula, where I rode a bus across America. I remember the Greyhound being pulled over near El Paso, Texas. Illegal immigrants were shuffled off by Border Patrol with midnight flashlights. Later through bus windows I saw the sun rising red over a Texas countryside: unforgettable morning shadows in tree canopies.

“We’re on a brick road from the 1600s, later part of the now-defunct trolley line. They won’t remove the tracks because they consider them historic,” Fortuna said as we began bumping along one short stretch of street. I’d been on them before in Ohio. Images of driving a car with Tommygirl in the mid-1990s shot into my head. Next thing I knew we jumped off the bus and walked along a street that reminded me of the beauty of San Francisco. I was in the heart of Georgetown: buildings crammed on narrow streets far older than late 19th century Bakersfield where the oldest buildings now were from the 1920s. Each townhouse and house I passed had more personality than entire California subdivisions of drywalled suburbia. This was architecture reflecting Europeans in early American cities; only these people wore post-modern reflections of a classy architectural past: dark clothes, clean cut images, even the punks in their trendy art motifs had fashionista style in the nation’s Capitol.

“I love my street. I’m so lucky to live here,” Fortuna said. She’d only been moved in for two weeks. “Well, except for the students across the street. They tend to get trashy after all-night parties. People forget how to clean up after themselves.”

We soon entered her house where an ancient cat sat on a couch staring at us. “That’s the real Fortuna,” she said. She mentioned that her nickname derived from that very kitty. Interesting enough.

Two dogs, Bettina and Hillary, both ghostly well-behaved giant poodles, one of them as ancient as her Roman column cat, also greeted us. One jumped up on me to say hello. I instantly cuddled.

Fortuna’s home is a cultural artifact: old books on the mantel from the 1700s, a few photos hung on the walls, and a poster or two depicting the culture of Washington D.C. hung here and there. DC culture is not something people usually think about on the West Coast: that D.C. is a haven for writers and poets; that the Library of Congress is a poet magnet in and of itself; and, art through the Smithsonian shines to the world from a beacon of Federal treasures where tourists and locals flock to research, or just peek and pass through.

One book sat open to a strange photo. I asked Fortuna about it. “I like to open that book to different pages and make up stories about the photos for my friends.”

“Oh do tell,” I said. I shot video of some of her response as she made up a silly story.

After a brief tour we walked her dogs around the block. We peered into the shadows of a building next door to her townhouse. It was built in the 1700s and looked like it could be haunted by several Victorian ghouls.

We then ate some food on ‘M’ Street at Pizzeria Paradiso, down in the cozy basement that only the locals know about, sheltered from the crowded, white-tablecloth world upstairs. We entered upstairs and all I could see were eyeballs staring at us from trendy plates. We shuffled through the ogling crowd, went down a flight of steps and sat at a bar. A fireplace was also down below surrounded by stacks of firewood. It smelled beautifully of wood and pizza. The bartender had tats and a faux Mohawk. In a strange way, he looked as clean cut as the tailored architecture of Georgetown.

But did I blend in? What would I seem like on such city streets?

Soon enough we were on the Georgetown campus. I was shocked to see the Healy building, built in 1789, and the very building that is shown as the Georgetown campus in the Exorcist film. One forgets that lives are lived daily at such Hollywood silver screen landmarks. Bakersfield has its own brand of Western moviemaking landmarks, both old and new as many Westerns from Stagecoach to Science Fiction like The Cell and Planet of the Apes were filmed in the Bakerfield/Kern County area. Makes me wonder if such thoughts are in the typical consciousness of Georgetown students as they pass the strange paintings and stairs of Healy Hall, or wander near the old Jesuit cemetery on campus…



We passed through the building and entered a courtyard. “This is where people like to go when they get frustrated, or need to think.” A fountain shot water into the bubbling darkness as we crossed the courtyard and entered tiny Dahlgren chapel. Inside, a pianist and violinist practiced a duet. The high ceiling made for haunting acoustics…

We passed where Fortuna’s old offices were and wandered along corridors. Eventually we found her car in a parking garage and began our drive around Washington D.C. We first made our way to Dumbarton Oaks. I found it strange that Fortuna would take me to the site of so many political conferences during the 1940s, but she said she was looking for its creepy, statuary grave yard, which she could not find in the dark. We couldn’t see the mansion, but did get out, careful to step over pumpkin roadkill and into the park surrounding Dumbarton’s hidden paths. I crept into the darkness of a large field surrounded by trees while her dogs roamed like pale animal ghosts.

We finally exited the park only to see a mysterious figure with a backpack enter the darkness. Who was he? Where was he headed? I’ll never know what truly lurks in the darkness of Dumbarton.

More irony abounded simply because a family relative of mine is a historian who wrote a book about Dumbarton Oaks. Fortuna thought that strange as well. I don’t talk much about my Caucasian background: Germanic and Swedish. There is a World War One and World War Two hero in my family, he’s just a shade of a memory and I remember was a fisherman who looked strangely like Ernest Hemingway. I have no photos of him, although I remember a white-haired image of him holding a string of fish. He died on Christmas Eve, 1974.

I once tried to make friends with this family relative but only got a cold shoulder. There was years-old distrust amid a family break-up. My mother was a young girl and ran away from Iowa to California on a bus to start a new life. The severing of ties is still a sharp cut through the cord of family blood and history.

Sometimes I think that my mother severing such ties was why I became a historian and writer, I value the history of my immediate family and promised to myself that history this time would not be lost…

Driving around Washington D.C. we headed over to wander through some restaurants near Fortuna’s home. That was right after we confronted the Exorcist steps. Anticipating such steps from a demonic movie was a disturbing twist to my night in D.C. What would I find? Who would I see?

No sooner had we approached the steps, an entire group approached. I filmed them as one clearly was the tour guide. “Guess how many steps,” he said. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get to the bottom because they were damn steep. I raced Fortuna back to the top. As we caught our breath we passed into a few restaurants on a creepy street where people ate dinners and desserts. At a popular campus pub called The Tombs there were many relics to rowing and East coast rowing teams and championships. It was tucked into a basement filled with patrons and the most pleasant smiling staff you could imagine. Above The Tombs, its more upscale sister, 1789 Restaurant – one of Washington’s finest -- had Georgetown kids in red jackets tending to the door and ready to valet park guests’ cars. There were hooks for jackets, something you don’t see in California: coat racks. We always hang ours on the backs of chairs.

Washington D.C. is a small city, much smaller than I imagined, and Pierre L’Enfant designed it to resemble a wagon wheel on a map, with spokes that radiate to the Mall area. Fortuna knows her Washington D.C. streets and so made directly down Pennsylvania Avenue for the White House. It was late, and desolate. Washington is not filled with stirring streets at night. Fortuna was brave and parked on the street near the White House. She wasn’t concerned with “No Parking” signs or Federal guards. “We’ll be fine,” she smiled.

We got out and made our way on a cold walk to the gates to the Presidential mansion. A tiny permanent protest with signs stood in a park across from the gates. It was too dark to tell what they protested. The White House itself stood brightly lit from all sides, the black gates strangely more like Disneyland than an actually political monument. The windows were all unlit. What was it about such a symbol? Is there a huge underground complex and the White House simply a cork in a bottle to the American mysticism hid below ground? I stared between the gates while the air grew colder. Fortuna shivered.



We drove around the White House and parked at the Old Executive Office Building, an unwieldy monstrosity with a strangely different design; some locals call it the “Munster Mansion.” I stood out in the cold, away from a no parking zone and smiled at such old architecture that surely was built in an America that believed in an artistic Renaissance of space, culture and grandeur.

Soon enough we made our way to the Washington Monument, where nearby we parked in another “No Parking” zone. “I think we’ll be fine, at least I hope so” Fortuna again smiled. She worried a tiny bit more about her car here, but not much. I couldn’t help but walk up and touch the monument, to feel its marble coldness, which I think was enough to get the security guard to come out and greet us. He acted like a good old boy, said he was from Florida. Yet here he was protecting one of America’s most sacred of monuments. He was playing dumb for sure.



We drove again and passed the Smithsonian buildings and parked near the Capitol. There I stood in awe of the brightly lit structure. It was larger than I expected, and more ornate, even as it stood out in the darkness. I was amazed that hardly anyone was out sightseeing or standing on the many steps leading up to the rotunda. There was just us and maybe four other people—other than a few guards. The guards appeared distrusting, yet hid behind slight pleasantries. Their clothes were as dark as night, hiding all but their pale faces and half-grimaces. We walked around the building, through some construction, between a makeshift fence and walked along the capitol wall, where I could see a guard staring down at us as we stood near a fountain. A lone couple near us sang The Star-Spangled Banner. Fortuna clapped softly and slowly, half admiring the impulse to sing in a spot like that, but also half offering comment on the touching, even ironic, patriotism of the song.


*Image taken by Danetta Bramhall a few days before I arrived

Afterwards we took a drive and parked near a big shallow lake known as the Tidal Basin. Across the basin a building glowed white, exploding into the darkness—a few tiny forms seemed to wander on its large base of steps. It was tall with a short rotunda, and was surrounded with steps that spread almost to the water’s edge. It looked exactly like the back of old nickels before the recent re-design. “A lot of people hang out on those steps in the summer,” Fortuna said. She talked politely about Fourth of July, and where the best places are to watch the fireworks, this being one of them. We walked along a path with Fortuna’s dogs, past ducks, and finally made our way around the glowing building. As we walked inside, just up the many steps, a security guard confronted Fortuna about her dogs. She argued and said her dogs would be fine and tied them up to a trashcan. They didn’t make a sound and the guard wandered away. Another guard sat inside on a bench.

The great statue of Thomas Jefferson stood within the Jefferson Memorial. Looking upon the cobwebbed head of the giant form I instantly thought of a book I once had students read from titled, Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence by Bernard Bailyn—he’s a legend among historians. He once wrote a note to local historian of early Dutch America, Dr. Oliver Rink, a note that the good doctor treasures. Within Faces of Revolution, Bailyn discusses the future impact of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, a mass of papers so incredible, so gargantuan in their enormity, that the volumes published between 1950 and 1989 only carry Jefferson’s story through 1792. He died in 1826. Historians still have their work cut out for them.

Jefferson returned from Europe, from Paris in 1789, oddly, the same year Healy Hall at Georgetown was built. Was Jefferson a changed man, now accepting of the Constitution he was once so critical over? Was it principles, circumstances, politics in an ever-changing arena of constitutional ratification that made him the odd world traveler of American and French Revolutions who saw a new Constitution had taken shape? And what now, in America, years later, papers not complete, he a great statue to bear down in a midnight hour over a traveler from the West, who sees the brilliance of Jefferson in words, and a monument of glowing national delicacy to the hungry palate of a D.C. traveler, who simply wanted to understand the Jeffersonian context before him? Would I ever? Would historians, ever?

I left the monument in such a state of mind, having stared at engravings, listened to echoes, and felt the ominous legacy of a man, who, like Bailyn suggests, is an incomplete man, because of incomplete history, uplifted in only partial understanding because of meticulous records yet unpublished, and a skewed one at that from years of stuffing the persona of such intellectual history into the relics of history. Oh how we so misplace Jefferson: Jeffersonian thinking, Jeffersonian agrarianism, Jeffersonian myths, Jeffersonian-progressivism, Jeffersonian feminism, and more… all wound into a place, a memorial, which includes certain perceptions that make you wonder if Jefferson was even human, or just a face on a Revolution that most Americans won’t ever understand, let alone many of the scholars bent on knowing him?

My head hurt as we drove.

We crossed the Potomac.

We wound around the Pentagon, then pulled onto what Fortuna called “a hidden turnoff, because it is so sudden…” and we did and ended up driving past a security booth, and into the parking lot of the Pentagon itself, and then right up toward its very exploded walls. And no one pulled us over. No tanks rolled out, no armed guards with machine guns blaring like star-spangled trumpets.

This was the America I wasn’t expecting. Even Jefferson, his ghost should have stormed from the shadows of walls and screamed the rights of man along with an arrest warrant for me and Fortuna for driving up into the Pentagon lot. But no one stopped us. Not a soul. And me in my most nervous state, the only real nervous moment I had in Washington D.C., would come to accept that Fortuna was indeed an adventurer, even in the urban federal jungle of her backyard playground, even amid the fortress brain of America…

*******

Union Station gets 29 million visitors a year. It’s Beaux-Arts Roman architecture led the way for the development of many buildings in DC in the early 1900s. It’s awe inspiring, with vaulted ceilings of Guastavino tiles. I could sense the enlightenment, that this building was indeed one of the grandest places on Earth 100 years ago. It opened in 1907, and even now, the colossal statues designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens look like they could adorn a citadel from my own fairy tale imagination. They stood in the vaulted air, stone like stoic markers of a past American Renaissance, of a city beautiful, where American ideals of Greeks and Romans and the thought of being such modern day heroes of humanity embodied within the Capitol’s buildings and art… they seemed to breath life into me.

I sat on a bench and stared into the vault. I had a few minutes before I needed to catch my train back to Baltimore. I watched the statues the way I thought they watched me: with an air of suspicion and awe; me a traveler, and they a traveler of time and intellectual transcendence. For every wayward immigrant and poor stranger to the city must shrug their shoulders at the might within such gates. These are cold grey stares from an architecture of a country with principles and meaning to people across the globe, but with common man-made guardians and principles, some of which embodied in the images I stared at beneath the stone canopy.

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Tuesday, November 07, 2006. You can leave your response.